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Thread: [FILM] The Age of Stupid

  1. #1
    Registered User AussieJ's Avatar
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    [FILM] The Age of Stupid

    The Age of Stupid is a drama documentary film from McLibel director Franny Armstrong

    Synopsis
    This is a drama-meets-documentary that casts Pete Postlethwaite in the role of "the archivist", alone in the year 2055, one of the last surviving human beings on the climatically devastated planet. The archivist - using his cache of all the world's broadcast material from past decades - is constructing a digital broadcast for other, future civilisations about why humanity failed to save itself from global warming. The film is anything but a good guys-versus-bad guys polemic; it is angry but nuanced, despairing but also motivating.
    Release Dates
    World Premiere - March 15
    UK release - March 20
    US release - April 2009
    European release - November 2009
    Australian release - August 2009

    Trailers
    Stupid Vimeo channel



    Links
    Official website
    IMDB profile
    Wikipedia entry
    Last edited by AussieJ; 24th-February-2009 at 09:55 PM.

  2. #2
    Registered User AussieJ's Avatar
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    Re: [FILM] The Age of Stupid

    My two cents - erm, pence??

    After just having watched the Glasgow Film Festival screening of The Age of Stupid (and not knowing anything about it beforehand) on Sunday, I'm quite glad to have seen it, really enjoyed it as a thought-provoking doco/film piece.

    And what made it all the more awesome for me, was that Franny Armstrong (the director) was present at the screening - she was sat at the front of the cinema room and fielded questions from anyone in the audience who'd just seen it. I got up and shook hands with her at the end and was able to have a chat - as a moviegoer I'd NEVER talked to a film director before in person at the actual screening of a film, so it was pretty cool!!

    I highly recommend this film to anyone who has even a slight awareness of global warming and climate change. Unlike Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth - which had a politically motivated and somewhat dull angle on conveying the message about climate change - The Age of Stupid is an independent, crowd-funded film with a grassroots approach and focus on everyday people whose wildly different lives and situations are caught up in the whole climate change thing.

    Come March 20th, check it out! If you won't, at least tell your friends about it - the director and her film crew needs as much buzz as possible about it, with a view towards getting good opening release attendance numbers and public awareness by the time UN Climate Summit @ Copenhagen comes about in Dec 2009

  3. #3
    Registered User AussieJ's Avatar
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    Re: [FILM] The Age of Stupid

    I could not figure out a way to edit my original post, so anyway, here's the poster:


  4. #4
    Registered User AussieJ's Avatar
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    Re: [FILM] The Age of Stupid

    The Age of Stupid's People's Premiere on Mar 15 apparently got confirmed by Guinness Book of Records:

    ...Guinness World Records has confirmed that the film's March 15 introduction to the U.K. will be the, "largest simultaneous film premiere in history," as it is shown across the country in 65 theaters.

    The whole premiere is set to be as carbon neutral as possible, with biodiesel fueling the VIPs' cars, a solar-powered projector at the London screening, and a green - used and reusable - "red" carpet.
    If any forumites haven't yet heard of this, its out now (released to cinemas on March 20).

  5. #5
    Registered User AussieJ's Avatar
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    Re: [FILM] The Age of Stupid

    Man I'm loving the ability to directly embed Youtube clips (cheers Franck!)


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    Re: [FILM] The Age of Stupid

    This film managed to keep me awake for 90 mins despite only having had half an hour's sleep the night before. Close call though.

    I was disappointed to see how small the audience was - mainly attended by the already convinced (otherwise known on this forum as workshy crusties ).

    I wanted to see it partly because I'm interested in the actuality and spin of climate change but also because it was a tiny budget movie made by a complete outsider of a director, and a woman to boot.

    The film was big on cataloguing the news reports of the evidence for climate change, much of which, like the shrinkage of glaciers, was made starkly plain. Perhaps wisely, less was said about what needs or should be to be done in order to deal with the situation - nobody really wants to be lectured at and this is the major flaw in any film of this type.

    The last few minutes projected forward into the future showing invented newsclips of the global catastrophes that may ensue if not action is taken - they had the opportunity to have us weeping with terror in our seats at that point and, surprisingly, did not milk it nearly as much as I'd have expected.

    Some of the action was played out through the lives of Mr and Mrs 2.4 Average living in an old farmhouse on a smallholding in Cornwall - not much chance of me identifying with that situation. A nice pop was taken at the kind of brainless nimbyism of people who campaign against practical measures to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel, like building wind farms, but still somehow imagine they're "doing their bit", probably by driving their 4x4 to recycle their carrier bags.

    Pete Postlethwaite was very watchable. Some of the action featured a futuristic Archive tower, rising above the waves on a stalk - I thought they missed the opportunity to make the film have more popular appeal by using lots more special effects to speculate about future scenarios and create a sci-fi feel - maybe they just couldn't afford it.

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